Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is preparing a major policy push on climate change,
including, for the first time, limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from new and existing power
plants, as well as expanded renewable-energy development on public lands and an accelerated effort
on energy efficiency in buildings and equipment, senior officials said yesterday.

Heather Zichal, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change, said the president
would announce the new policy initiatives in the coming weeks. Another official said a presidential
address outlining the new policy could come as early as next week.

“He is serious about making it a second-term priority,” Zichal said at a forum in Washington
sponsored by the magazine
The New Republic.

Zichal suggested in her remarks that a central part of the administration’s approach to dealing
with climate change would be to use the authority given to the Environmental Protection Agency to
address climate-altering pollutants from power plants under the Clean Air Act.

She said that none of the initiatives being considered by the administration required
legislative action or new financing from Congress, but any effort to clamp down on power-plant
emissions is likely to provoke intense opposition in Congress and litigation by industry.

Such regulations would hurt states dependent on cheap power produced from coal and would drive
up electricity prices, at least in the short term.

In a speech in Berlin yesterday, Obama said the United States and the world had a moral
imperative to take “bold action” to slow the warming of the planet.

“The grim alternative affects all nations — more severe storms, more famine and floods, new
waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise,” Obama said. “This is the future we
must avert. This is the global threat of our time.”